To mark Black History Month, Patrick Lawrence Gilligan researches the incredible story of a jockey called Simon and a racehorse called Haynie’s Maria.
He was said to have been just four feet and six inches tall and possessed of very long arms and legs, a small body and a hunchback.
He came to South Carolina on a slave ship from Africa when just a child. Some said he was a Prince in his homeland. He became a Prince of the American turf. A future president of the USA tried to defeat him nine times. And nine times he failed.
He was thought to have been born in the early 1780s, and turned into a slave around the age of ten. It is not known if he had encountered horses before arriving - rather unexpectedly - in the newly formed United States, where horseracing in South Carolina was pre-eminent and already well established.
As a teenager, he rode against the best. Apparently, he had an aloof manner, possessed great wit and a strong line in sarcasm. He was described at the time as a most skillful jockey with a graceful seat and no danger, no peril too great for his courage. He didn’t seem to have read the label placed upon him, and in truth it mattered not upon a horse in the heat of a race, black and white faces were equal there between the rails.
Unexpected respect
While post war anti-English sentiment and puritanism saw racing fade in the North, it continued to thrive in the South.
He became famous in South Carolina, and although he had nicknames, those with bearing on the track, with unexpected respect, invariably just referred to him as Simon.
He was owned by a man called Foster but was often rented out to a Colonel George Elliott, who raced in Tennessee. The Prince would have seen the newly introduced Irish bluegrass there, before it ever blew into Kentucky.
One time Simon was riding against one of Elliot’s horses. Simon won the race by employing every form of jockeyship he had in his arsenal and cost the Colonel $1,000 in lost wagers. The Colonel’s temper lost, he tore a strip off the four-foot-six slave for his tactics. The Prince coolly returned, “Well Colonel Elliot, I’ve won many a race that way for you, and it is the first time I ever heard you object.”
General Andrew Jackson was prominent in the forming of the Nashville racecourse and indeed the whole sport in Tennessee.
A formidable man, a sturdy six feet one, and a temper to go with it, he once dueled a man over an unpaid forfeit for a race (could it have been at the Dueling Grounds - now Kentucky Downs?) He aimed deliberately at the man’s groin, and didn’t miss, fatally wounding him. Simon, though, it seemed, looked down on him. What is a Major General compared with a Prince?
Her name was Maria. She was a daughter of Diomed, the recently imported winner of the very first English Derby. She was owned by a Captain Jesse Haynie and became known as Haynie’s Maria.
Maria and the Prince defeated the General in battle after battle. In the end, the General had to wave the white flag. He retired from the challenge in bad spirit, and went off to do something less challenging - like running the country. He would go on to set up a full racing stables at the White House. That is what a big deal horseracing was back then.
Maria and the Prince defeated Jackson’s charge a couple of times, and Jackson didn’t like it one bit. He embarked on grudge match after grudge match, and each time the Prince swatted him away, leaving Jackson beetroot red.
Before one contest, Jackson approached the rider and said, “Now Simon, when my horse and rider come to pass you, don’t spit your tobacco juice in their eyes.”
“Why General,” the Prince replied, “I rode a great deal against your horses, but none of them ever got close enough to catch my spit.” Jackson was defeated again.
‘Bitter oaths’
Jackson swore he would beat Haynie’s Maria - if a horse could just be found in the United States to do it!
After their ninth and final battle, Jackson apparently “became like a madman, sending forth bitter oaths and torrents of threats”.
The Prince looked on in amusement.
Simon was a fine banjo player, and sang amusing made-up ditties. He came across Major General Andrew Jackson one day in a crowd. And this he said or sang to the warrior general:
“General, you were always ugly, but now you’re a show,
I could make a fortune by showing you as you now look,
If I had you in a cage where you could not hurt the people who come to look.”
The Prince, still enslaved, still rented out, took umbrage one year when his master tried to bid him up. Concerned he would lose the employment of his favored choice of retainer, he turned to Colonel Foster and said, “By God, I’m not a selling, just hired for one year.”
This infuriated Foster, who replied, “You impudent scoundrel! Do you know who you are talking to?!”
“I think I do.” The Prince replied. “If I am not mistaken, you are the same gentleman who made a failed experiment for Governor once.”
Haynie’s Maria tasted defeated only once, in her final race, at the age of nine.
“Was there ever anything you ever undertook heartily and failed to accomplish?” An older General Jackson was asked once.
“Not that I can remember,” he replied. “Except Haynie’s Maria. I could not beat her.”
Or the Prince. General Jackson couldn’t beat the Prince either. The Prince of American horseracing, in his own mind at least.
The Prince died of cholera in Tennessee in 1833. His death was reported in Nashville’s National Banner:
DEATHS IN NASHVILLE BY CHOLERA
Simon, negro man, commonly called Monkey Simon, aged 52.
He wasn’t labelled as a slave, though, so maybe he died free at least.
Sources include
- · The Great Black Jockeys - Edward Hotaling 1999
- · Making the American Thoroughbred - James Douglas Anderson 1916